bore the brunt of the joke

English translation: were the butt of the joke OR bore the brunt of the "funny" silences...

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GLOSSARY ENTRY (DERIVED FROM QUESTION BELOW)

English term or phrase:

bore the brunt of the joke

English translation:

were the butt of the joke OR bore the brunt of the "funny" silences...

English to English translations [PRO]Art/Literary - General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters

English term or phrase:bore the brunt of the joke

I'm editing an author who writes:

Women often bore the brunt of the joke as the object of “funny” silences and misunderstandings.

I looked the phrase up using Google, and I got 5K hits, yet it sounds to me as if she is mixing two idiomatic expressions--"bore the brunt of X" (as in carrying the weight of or feeling the impact of) and "were the butt of the joke".

For the latter, one writer on-line explained: "In every form of humor . . . , there's always a target or a victim. The butt of the joke, as we popularly called it, can be a person, an object, an animal, a place or even an idea or a view."

I'm interested in hearing people's opinions of whether "bore the brunt of the joke" should be changed. TIA!

Obviously saying "he/she was the brunt of the joke" is incorrect. In this case, the correct expression would be: he/she was the butt of the joke.
However one can certainly "bear the brunt of a joke." I found this wild-and-interesting example online: Abdera was a city in Thrace, whose inhabitants bore the brunt of dumb-ethnic jokes since at least the days of Cicero in the first century BCE. (The "brunt" is the blow or force and one can interpret some jokes as being pretty unkind, prejudicial, etc. which make them akin to a "hit" or a "blow." Don't you think so, too? :-)

Reference comments

10 hrs

Reference: butt/brunt

Reference information:This seems to be a common error.

This is from the link below
A person who is the target of jokers is the butt of their humor (from an old meaning of the word “butt”: target for shooting at). But the object of this joking has to bear the brunt of the mockery (from an old word meaning a sharp blow or attack). A person is never a brunt. The person being attacked receives the brunt of it.